Android emulator: AMD processor and Hyper-V support

Making the Android Emulator faster is one of the top priorities for the Android Studio team. Over the last few releases, we have launched quick boot & emulator snapshots for quickly starting and resuming emulator sessions in under 2 seconds. Up until now, our emulator experience has almost universally worked on macOS and Linux computers. But for users of Microsoft Windows or the Microsoft Hyper-V platform, our hardware accelerated speed enhancements for the Android Emulator only worked with computers with Intel processors. Support for AMD processors and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor are two long-standing user requests from the Android developer community that we are happy to address with this Android Emulator update.

Welcome addition with the recent popularity of AMD Zen-based processors.

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Using an AMD A8-3500M that features AMD-V (AMD Virtualization technology), the Android Emulator use it under Linux but not under Windows ? Why ? Why are we stuck to Intel HAXM on Windows ? Why have we now to upgrade to Windows 10 to get WHPX ? Why is this artificial software segregation allowed ?

As I understand it, Microsoft did most/all of the work to make this happen on HyperV. They did it to improve the experience, but it also helped because Windows only supports one hypervisor at a time, and if you’re using HyeprV, you can’t also use the HAXM stuff without jumping through hoops. As Docker and such like now use HyperV, you were quite screwed if your API was in a Docker container and you needed to run up an Android VM to debug…